Google Buys Motion Gesture Tech Firm Flutter

Google has acquired motion gesture technology company Flutter. Flutter CEO Navneet Dalal announced the news on the company's site.

Flutter's technology allows users to control their devices without touching them, using hand gestures. It currently has an app for Mac and Windows, which uses a webcam, and will apparently remain functional. It's unclear at this point what all Google intends to do with the acquisition, but obviously there are plenty of possibilities across its many products, including Google Glass, Android and Chrome.

"When we started three years ago, our dream to build a ubiquitous and power-efficient gesture recognition technology was considered by many as just 'a dream', not a real possibility," writes Dalal. "Since then, we have strived to build the best machine vision algorithms and a delightful user experience."

"Even after we launched our first app, we didn’t stop our research; your enthusiasm and support pushed us to continue to do better," he adds. "We’re inspired everyday when we hear, for example, that Flutter makes you feel like a superhero — because any sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic, right?"

Google confirmed the acquisition in a statement to TheNextWeb, saying, "We’re really impressed by the Flutter team’s ability to design new technology based on cutting-edge research. We look forward to supporting and collaborating on their research efforts at Google."

Terms were not disclosed.

Here's a look at what Flutter can do:

If you go to the BotSquare (the old brand behind Flutter) YouTube channel, you can see that they shared Google's video for its Gmail Motion product:

On the BotSquare Facebook page, they said it sucked compared to their technology.